"How else to describe a single company - OpenAI - making $1.4 trillion worth of deals (and counting!) with an extremely impressive but commensurately tiny $13 billion of reported revenue? Sure, the actual number may be higher, but that is still two orders of magnitude less than the amount of infrastructure OpenAI has publicly committed to buy over the coming years, and they are not the only big spenders."
"The definitive book on bubbles has long been Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. Bubbles were - are - thought to be something negative and to be avoided, particularly at the time Perez published her book. The year was 2002 and much of the world was in a recession coming off the puncturing of the dot-com bubble. Perez didn't deny the pain: in fact, she noted that similar crashes marked previous revolutions, including the Industrial Revolution, railways, electricity, and the automobile."
A single company, OpenAI, has arranged roughly $1.4 trillion of deals while reporting about $13 billion in revenue, creating a striking mismatch between commitments and current income. Multiple major technology firms (except Apple) have recently increased capital expenditure plans, expanding infrastructure investment. Such rapid speculative investment inflates a bubble that will likely crash, producing recession and corporate failures. Historical patterns show speculative manias have driven an "Installation Phase" that funds physical capacity and platform building during previous technological revolutions like railways, electricity, and automobiles. The inflated investment creates durable infrastructure and standards that can enable long-term diffusion and productivity gains despite an inevitable downturn.
Read at Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]